Awards:
FIPRESCI Prize, Best Film Award, Cannes Film Festival, 1975; Best Film in
"Forum," Berlin Film Festival, 1975; Salonika Festival,
Greek Critics' Association, Best Film, Best Director, Best
Screenplay, Best Actor, and Best Actress, 1975; Italian Critics
Association, Best Film in the World for 1970–80, 1979.

A young man in a uniform walks onto a stage during a performance and
murders an older woman and man. The two actually die on stage. The curtain
closes as the audience applauds wildly.

The moment takes place more than half way through Angelopoulos's
third feature,
O Thiasos
, and in this one tightening of a narrative strand which until then had
seemed quite loose and desperate, we see drama, history, myth, and
personal destinies cross paths. For the young man is Orestes, an actor and
young communist in northern Greece during World War II, and the woman and
man he has killed
are his mother, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthos, who betrayed his
father, Agamemnon, to the Nazis who executed him.

At almost four hours in length and as a non-chronological investigation of
Greek history during the troubled period l939 to 1952,
O Thiasos
(
The Travelling Players
) might seem an unlikely film to be considered by many as the most
important Greek film ever made, and one of the most significant films shot
anywhere in the first 100 years of cinema's appearance.

When it appeared in Greece in l975, Angelopoulos's poetic
historical epic was seen by more Greeks than any other Greek film before
it. Angelopoulos has his own distinctive cinematic style, but the
immediate appeal to Greeks was the content: he dared to present a Marxist
left-wing vision of modern Greek history, including the very painful Civil
War of l945–49 in which almost one million Greeks died. No
filmmaker before him had dared to do so. Immediately his film became part
of a national discourse in a way in which few films have. "The
reason that
O Thiasos
has had a tremendous impact in Greece," wrote an editor of
Athenian
at the time of its release, "is its presentation of a view of
events which has been stifled, rarely discussed in polite company, and
ignored in official accounts of history." In short, the film
suggests what historians such as Dominique Eudes and others have detailed,
that many Greeks who were not necessarily communist, worked with the
Partisans to help liberate Greece from the Germans and then continued to
side with the communists because they were even more disenchanted by right
wing monarchists who catered more often to foreign interests than to the
needs of the people.

With the release of the film in Europe shortly after,
O Thiasos
swiftly became a cult film for cineastes from London to Rome and around
Eastern Europe as well as a favourite for left-wing filmmakers concerned
with how to represent "history" on screen successfully
without become either too didactic or over simplified. (The appreciation
of Angelopoulos's work was much slower in developing, but with the
Museum of Modern Art Retrospective of his films in l992, critical and
public interest began to grow.) Bertolucci in Italy, for instance, claimed
that his study of Italian history in
1900
(1977) was directly influenced by Angelopoulos's epic. And at the
end of the decade of the l970s, Italian critics went as far as to vote
O Thiasos
the most important film in the world for the whole decade.

Angelopoulos appeared in the late l960s as the most talented among a new
generation of Greek filmmakers who ironically came of age cinematically
under the difficult restrictions of the military Junta's rule
(1967–74). Having studied film in Paris, Angelopoulos was, like
many of his generation, influenced by a variety of "foreign"
sources including Japanese cinema, East European models, the French New
Wave, and Italian neo-realism. And yet Angelopoulos set out clearly to
explore what he has called "the Other Greece" that Greece
itself and the outside world had never seen. This "Other"
Greece Angelopoulos observes is clearly much more "Balkan"
than Mediterranean, full of towns and villages becoming depopulated by the
changes in modern history, neither fully living in the 20th century or in
the past, heavily influenced by a legacy of 400 years under Turkish rule
and not sure that any future exists. Angelopoulos's characters are
most often shot as stationary figures in grey winter landscapes rather
than as passionate lovers, dancers, and warriors seen in Michael
Cacoyannis's
Zorba the Greek.
Angelopoulos intertwines Greek myth and history in provocative ways. The
travelling players are a troupe of actors wandering the small towns and
villages of northern Greece performing a simple melodrama about a shepherd
girl, "Golfo." But their drama is constantly interrupted by
"history" as the Italians invade in l939, followed shortly
after by the Nazis, and, after the war, by the Civil War itself. The final
"invasion" is seen to be that of the American influence on
Greece. Yet the actions and characters are reflected off an ancient
mythical heritage as we learn the individual troupe members are named
Electra, Orestes, and Aegisthos as we have already seen. We are thus
invited to consider the parallels and differences between these modern
representatives of the
Oresteia
trilogy of Aeschylus.

Angelopoulos offers no simplistic "update" or direct
one-on-one correspondence between ancient myths and modern realities. In
fact, he forces us to consider how different modern history has become
from the reality of ancient drama and myth. No gods enter the scene in
O Thiasos.
Instead we see a family and a troupe torn apart by political divisions as
some choose to join partisan communist forces both during World War II and
during the Civil War that followed, while others, especially, Aegisthos,
the "traitor," become collaborators with the Germans and
with right wing forces after the war.

Beyond the content, however, is Angelopoulos's striking visual
style.

He champions the long take shot in long distance. At a time when film,
video, and television have converged to offer audiences faster and faster
editing as seen especially on music videos and television commercials,
Angelopoulos has turned to a more poetic and meditative cinema through the
haunting camera work of Giorgos Arvanitis, with whom he has worked his
entire career. One tracking shot, for instance, in
O Thiasos
follows a group of left-wing protesters down the street of a Greek town.
But in that single shot lasting over six minutes, three different time
periods are captured, suggesting visually, therefore, the link of
"protest" which bridges time.

His framing in long shots also helps to de-dramatize each scene. In many
ways, Angelopoulos's art is that of what he leaves out: extreme
violence, passion, conflict. He also breaks up any possibility of smooth
Hollywood styled linear narrative or character development by having the
characters turn from time to time to the camera and deliver long
monologues as if they have known us well some other time, some other
place. When Agamemnon is betrayed (as in the myth and drama), he is taken
before a Nazi firing squad. But before he dies, he faces the camera in
close up and explains who he is, ending with the simple question,
"And who are you?" We then cut to an extreme long shot on a
grey winter morning as he is shot dead and crumples to the ground. As in
the whole epic, this moment asks us to consider a life rather than observe
a bloodbath using the conventions of cinematic war violence.

Finally, Angelopoulos's epic is a cyclical one. We begin and end
with the travelling players, travelling. They are standing, suitcases in
hand, at the same train station in the opening and in the closing of the
film, yet the difference in years is significant: the opening shot is in
l952, after the war and the Civil War, while the closing shot is l939,
poised just before these momentous changes take place.

We have ended at the beginning and must leave the cinema asking ourselves
if history merely repeats itself or if such an inverted circle suggests
any possibility of advancement. Twenty years after the
release of this landmark film, we still respond to the beauty and
warnings enclosed in Angelopoulos's haunting text.

—Andrew Horton

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic: